Figure 3. Serum IFNα is not uniformly increased in SLE patients and does not correlate with disease activity.

Serum samples from 26 SLE patients (right) and an equal number of age and sex-matched healthy controls (left) were used to determine levels of IFNα with a commercial kit that detects 14 of the 15 known isoforms of the cytokine. Data from SLE patients were plotted to examine the correlation with disease activity according to the SLEDAI scores and are expressed as picograms/milliliter. R² = 0.03641.